Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Hm, kind of… edgy, I guess. Like, modern and nontraditional. It’s neat, actually. I think I’d be excited to be around so many people working on so many different projects. It’d make me think that the people I was meeting with were on top of, like, trends or popular culture or whatever.”

Will had listened to me seriously, and he nodded once, satisfied. “Me too.”

“Okay, great,” he said to the woman who’d been showing us around. “I think we’ll probably go ahead with it. I just need to confirm it with my business partner. Can I let you know later today?”

The woman looked between us and Will offered no explanation.

“Sure, that’ll work.”

Will shook her hand, and when we walked outside, he was grinning.

“I like that place,” he said giddily. “It’ll be so different than the office. Want to get a coffee? I want a coffee.”

“Yeah, sure.” I loved seeing him so happy. So exuberant and light. It didn’t happen that often. As we walked, though, and the usual barrage of admirers looked Will up and down, their gazes lingering on him, his mood dimmed. By the time he pulled me into a little café on Houston, he was tapping his fingers against his thighs irritably. There were no empty tables, so we stood at a corner of the counter to drink our coffees, Will glancing around as if he could still feel eyes on him.

My phone chimed with a text from Layne asking if I could come in an hour early for my shift the next day. In the minute it took me to respond, a man sidled up to Will and started talking to him. Will’s jaw was tight, teeth gritted.

All the things he’d told me. About being so aware of people’s eyes on him that he sometimes felt stripped bare by it. Of the way it gradually wore down his energy and his mood by the end of the day until sometimes he could hardly wait to get home behind closed doors just so he could exist in a space where he wasn’t being looked at. They coalesced into a surge of protectiveness like nothing I’d ever felt before.

“Oy,” I said to the guy. I slid an arm around Will’s waist in a way I had secretly always wanted to but never dared do in public. “Back off my boyfriend, dude.” I channeled Daniel, who’d once told me that you had to be totally confident in your superiority over the person you were challenging to make them take you seriously.

The man smirked at me disbelievingly and looked at Will. His look clearly said, Yeah right. No way did a skinny kid like you manage to land yourself a hottie like that. I flushed, but stood my ground, fingers curling around Will’s hip. I was expecting him to pull away at any minute or tell us both to go fuck ourselves. But he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes at the guy and put his arm around me in turn, tugging me closer. Then he kissed me on the cheek, lips lingering long enough for me to smell the vanilla from his latte.

“Oookay,” the guy said like he’d just been faced with something too confusing to attempt to puzzle out. “Have a good one.” And he walked away.

I felt as triumphant as if I’d been telling the truth about Will and me, the warmth of being able to defend Will suffusing me. I went to drop my arm from his waist before he could call me on the fiction, but he let his arm linger for a minute, so I did too.

“Um, sorry I said you were my boyfriend. I just… I thought you might want a rescue, and that guy seemed like kind of a douchebag.”

Will gave me a long assessing look and then smiled. And I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he didn’t totally hate what I’d done after all.

Chapter 17

April

SPRING HAD sprung with a vengeance and the energy on campus was electric. No matter what time of day I walked through the park, there were groups of students camped out, shirts rolled up to the sun, heads on each other’s shoulders, and textbooks lying abandoned in front of them in the new grass.

Those who were staying on campus for the summer were angling for the best rooms, those who were from the city making plans to see each other after the semester ended, and everyone else was grumbling about going home or scheming about how to stay. I didn’t know a single person who hadn’t fallen in love with New York in some way.

Midway through April, I found out I’d gotten the job working as an assistant in the physics lab and could count myself among the excited ones who would be staying in the city for the summer.